Confusing the Legal with the Social. Part 1

With two year's thought I have reconsidered. The problem with writing about squatters isn't so much about identifying the intentional versus the unintentional squatters; it is instead how squatting is defined and when.

Simply put, squatting in the 19th century just isn't the same as squatting in the 20th, or 21st. The significant difference is that squatting now has more legal presence than social. The opposite was more true in the 19th century, when squatting was general, unremarkable, and had a class weight behind it.

Surprisingly the idea of squatting, or at least that application of the word seems to have evolved through the 19th century. The fact of unauthorized occupation certainly predates that century, but the idea that there was something wrong about it, some social judgement, grows throughout the 19th century and squatting became a social state in addition to the legal.

If I had to speculate, and at this point I am because I am in mid-literature review, the cultural panic over squatting and the increased notice of squatting across the nation after the Civil War is part and parcel with the social unease over tramps and immigration.

This migration of meanings, this easy slide between the legal observation and the social accusation, creates an unstable middle ground. Most historians that approach this quaking bog hold their noses and dash across, merely noting in passing that squatters were at such-and-such location when the real settlers arrived. Civilization is assumed to have brushed them aside.
More enterprising scholars, those with some imagination (or an axe to grind), stop mid-mire and report. The most interesting are prone to exciting categorical statements. While Charles Abrams recognized the moral angle to modern urban squatting, he saw it as a phase of urbanization and development and the result of conditions that didn't exist inside the United States. Indeed, he viewed the example of the 19th century U.S. as a model for developing nations to avoid mushrooming squatter settlements. In his volume Squatter Settlements: The problem and opportunity. (1966), Abrams argued in classic Chicago School fashion that the frontier siphoned off the excess population with opportunities for fertile uncontested land, and so the United States never experienced widespread urban squatting. Overlooking any other motives the migrants may have for locating in the city slums of those cities, Abrams argues that the solution to the mega-settlements surrounding Nairobi, Lima, and Sao Paulo is for the governments of those nations to open their frontiers so people can farm.

The problem for Abrams is that there is no evidence for American exceptionalism, and plenty of evidence that urban squatting was both widespread and of general concern throughout the frontier era.